Computer Not Well ? Bring It In!

Computer viruses keep us very busy! It seems the “geniuses” that are out there creating viruses have nothing better to do than bring misery to the home computer user by causing untold destruction! We have had some unlucky customers just click on a legitimate-looking link in an email and end up loosing all their data from corruption!

If your computer is doing strange things, being very slow or anything from the list below – bring it in and we can run a full virus detection package on it. We will need your computer for a few days because some of the programs can take a while to scan every file on your computer. We typically use 4 different programs when we do virus scans so we can be sure its clean when we hand it back.

Virus Detection

If your computer has a virus, it may begin to show any number of symptoms. Some infections can be very harmful to your PC by damaging important files, and corrupting data. A computer virus can also increase the risk of further hacks and security threats, by “opening the door” to even more unauthorized downloads and software installations. Some signs that you may have a virus include:

• Your files may appear to be moving, changing size or doing other suspicious things
• Your computer runs slower than usual
• Your computer stops responding or it locks up frequently
• Your computer crashes, and then it restarts every few minutes
• Your computer restarts on its own
• Applications on your computer do not work correctly
• Disks or disk drives are inaccessible
• You cannot print items correctly
• Your computer displays unusual error messages
• You can see distorted menus and dialog boxes
• There is a double extension on an attachment that you recently opened such as a .jpg, .vbs, .gif, or .exe extension
• If you have an anti-virus program installed, it may become disabled for no reason. Also it cannot be restarted.
• If you don’t already have an anti-virus program installed, your computer may not let you install one. It may not even let you visit websites that provide anti-virus or internet security programs for download.
• New icons appear on the desktop that you did not put there or the icons are not associated with any recently installed programs

Virus Removal

Some of the symptoms can also be caused by hardware failure or other software issues. It is important that we determine the real culprit before it gets any worse to prevent major damage to your computer and its files.

The best course of action if your computer is displaying the above symptoms, is to bring your machine in to us so we can properly diagnose the problem and repair where possible. If you are able to, we recommend backing up your data first.

We recommend Kaspersky Internet Security. This can be purchased in the store and is $59 for a 2 year license for 1 computer – we think its cheap insurance!